Posts Tagged ‘daughters’

In honor of Father’s Day, our daughter Piper’s kindergarten class had a “Coffee & Donuts with Dad” celebration this morning. After consuming plenty of caffeine (him) and sugar (both of them), she presented him with this accordion-style card. (Maybe other parents start to think these homemade cards are old hat, but I gotta tell you, they just sock me in the heart every time.) The only instructions given to the class were to begin with, “The most important thing about my dad is…” It’s always interesting to see how a five-year-old answers these kinds of questions; in our case, dad’s vital qualities are: “He loves me,” followed closely by the all-important “He plays street hockey.”

Reading this card made me, once again, grateful for the setup at our house, where we are all under each other’s noses, almost all the time. We are two parents who work from home with two kids under six, so our house (and the dishwasher) is always full and dad is around almost as much as mom. (When I tell the girls that some dads leave the house before the kids wake up and work in office buildings downtown, I get blank, uncomprehending stares.) Sure, this lifestyle has its ups and downs. There are times when both of us are desperate to go to a nice civilized office for a few hours, wearing grown-up clothes. But mostly, we feel unbelievably lucky.

No matter what the situation at your house, it’s important to give dad as much opportunity as mom to navigate life with the kid(s). It’s the only way to ensure you are all in this magical, sticky, frustrating, eye-opening world together. We’ve all seen how easy is to for new moms to slide into doing everything themselves, because they feel they know best. So they micromanage. They over-explain. They constantly check in when dad is in charge. And somewhere along the way, they shoot themselves in the foot.

Moms, chances are that partner you’ve chosen for this unpredictable path of parenthood is fun, smart, loving, and perfectly capable of wiggling his way out of any parenting jam. Give him the freedom to find his own way, and every member of the family benefits. Hope you’ll weigh in on my Father’s Day column for Seattle’s Child!

Letting Dad Do His Thing

My friend Liza once told me that she gives her child all of his baths. Why? “Oh, his dad doesn’t know how to do it the way Jacob likes it – so it’s just easier this way.”

Hmm. So, dad checks out with a beer and mom is on deck, night after night. And worse, Jacob and dad never learn to find their own way to a fun bath time, guy style. That’s a shame. Who among us has made these sorts of comments to the dad of your house this week?

Not that binky, the other one!

You’re holding her the wrong way.

You’re bouncing him too much; he’ll throw up!

That’s not how she likes her pasta.

Are you taking her out in that?

Oh, never mind, I’ll just do it.

When does this micromanagement of dads begin? Perhaps in the newborn months, when mom is often the primary caregiver of what seems to be a very fragile little being. Hormones and worry combine to up the ante, and we can become convinced that we know not just the best way, but the only way, to care for our child. All understandable. But keeping that pattern into toddlerhood, early childhood, and beyond is not the way to go. It can cause resentment and frustration, and in the end it only defeats the purpose of having dad do his share – and reap the rewards of time spent on his own with his child.

After all, don’t we all want more engagement from our partners, and a child who doesn’t expect everything to be done exactly as mom would? Don’t we? Yet somehow, we can resist releasing that control.

“I was hosting friends and their baby, and the mom asked her husband to do the diaper change since we were in the middle of a conversation,” another friend recalls. “Then she followed him upstairs and checked on him anyway.”

The irony? After lecturing him on how the diaper was on too tight, she had to eat crow when he explained that the diaper she was criticizing hadn’t even been changed yet – so it was the diaper that she put on that was supposedly unacceptable.

Listen up, moms: Let go a little. Give dad some freedom to do things his way. Bite your tongue and let him discover a new technique to swaddle the baby, get peas into your toddler’s mouth, or comb your kindergartener’s hair. Let him feel both the joy of success (shoes and socks on!) and the pain of defeat (she won’t nap!). You both deserve that – and so do your kids.

This doesn’t mean you can’t help out your spouse by explaining lessons you’ve learned by trial and error with your child- – something he maybe hasn’t had as much of if he’s been away more than you. But as with any unsolicited advice, there’s a wrong way (“Don’t just dump water on his head! He hates that! You’ll get soap in his eyes! Why is it so cold in here?”) and a right way. The wrong way can quickly become an excuse for a frustrated dad to give up and let mom do it. That isn’t a desirable result for anyone.

So, if your suggestion isn’t an immediate safety imperative, hold your comments. Later, if there’s something you truly think you can help with, wait for a good moment and finesse your delivery. If your spouse had a hard time doing the bath his way, for example, try phrasing your advice like this: “I really struggle getting Sally’s hair washed, too. It’s not easy. Do you know what I found has worked this week? I hold a toy really high over my head – then when she looks up I rinse her hair with my other hand.” My guess is that an approach like that will go over a lot better than bursting into the bathroom at the first sound of crying and demanding to know what’s going on.

Parenting is nothing if not an exercise in creativity and problem-solving, and it’s no fun if you make someone imitate your process step by step. (Does it really matter whether the pajamas come before or after the teeth, for example, as long as both steps happen? Probably not.)

But beyond that, it’s important to show the dad in your life that you not only trust him, but you admire his skills. Did he manage tickle your daughter out of a tantrum? Have a blast taking the kids to Home Depot in their PJs? Find a way to make cauliflower edible? Give him his props. He deserves it. Let dad sing different songs, soothe in his own way, and play games that would never cross your mind. Basically, let him be truly in charge sometimes, without your input. Repeat after me: This is what you want. You may even find that once you let yourself stand back a little, you learn some new tips and tricks to use yourself.

I know that supposedly, there’s going to come a time when my kids won’t need me every ten seconds. When they will stop shouting “come with me” before every task and try, in fact, to do things without me. When they will actually want–nay, demand–THEIR SPACE. This is very, very hard to imagine when your kids are two and five and love their parents with a passion bordering on desperation. Chaotic, noisy desperation.

Boy, kids sure have a lot to say

If you’re like me, you never realized what a precious commodity quiet was until you had young kids. (Where, WHERE, is the volume control on these little humans??) While I don’t think of myself as a particularly quiet person, I have come to see how much I crave stillness now that it has been taken away from me and virtually banished from my home. It seems that every time I look down, someone is hanging on to my leg and demanding that I act like a mermaid. Every time I turn my back, someone has run into the coffee table and started wailing. Every time I try to sneak over to the couch with a glass of wine at the end of a long day, two girls alternately climb on my head and yell into my ear about who has more lap space and why it isn’t fair. Some days, it makes the idea of a mindless factory job making widgets while wearing earplugs seem wildly appealing. Eight hours of that sounds so…peaceful.

But then, if it weren’t for the riot of a couple of strong-willed, strong-lunged little girls in my house, how would I ever appreciate the quiet that I took utterly for granted before? How would I come to savor the sweet bliss of five minutes where no one wants anything, no one complains or cries, no one licks my face and laughs maniacally about it? If you’re a parent, you know exactly what I mean. There are those moments where you and your partner lock eyes over the heads of your silent-for-now kids and share a knowing smile that says: See, we’re getting there. They are entertaining themselves quietly. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We must be awesome parents!

That appreciation of the small miracle of silence was never more apparent to me than one particular night over the holidays. Racked with various kindergarten-derived illnesses, Christmas “break” at our house had been full of visitors, friends, laundry, and antibiotics. Everyone was stir-crazy and snappish, especially at dinnertime. So instead of hustling everyone through their paces per usual, we ordered sushi (a family favorite), let everyone eat in the living room, loosened the usual bedtime, and put the new Ryan Bingham CD, Junky Star, on the stereo. And for some reason, no one whined that they wanted Disney Princess Sing-Along Songs. No one even fought about my lap. Everyone finished eating, found their own space under various blankets on the couch, and was…quiet. That’s the memory of the holidays that I choose to take along with me into the new year: a slow, raspy ballad on the stereo, my warm family on the couch, a belly full of hamachi, and everyone enjoying a moment’s peace. Who knows, maybe even my daughters got a little taste of how sometimes, it’s good (restorative, enjoyable, necessary, wonderful) to be still.

One can hope.

Tell me: How do you carve out moments of stillness and silence in your life? I’d love to hear (especially if it doesn’t involve getting up at 5:30a.m. to achieve it, but okay, you can tell me that, too).

Hello, fall. It’s me, ever the good student–ready to face September (or at least October) head-on.

Headfirst

You could say I was a little MIA this summer; its been so long since my last post that my computer has stopped recognizing me. I suppose I took most of the summer “off”–if your definition of “off” means taking care of two high-energy preschoolers, making about a thousand picnic lunches, and traipsing around to every beach, park, and wading pool in King County. I have to admit, though, it was super-fun. Exhausting, but super-fun. I am not by nature a summer girl (too bright, too hot, too much pressure to do stuff, too much SPF required), something sun-starved Seattleites tend to find shocking and weird. This year was different. Goofing around and eating countless lime popsicles with a couple of swimsuited cuties at the peak of their twirly-whirly affection and silliness started to change my mind.

Backyard Imps

But just as I was coming around, the weather changed and all the backpacks in the universe came to the front of the stores with a resounding thud. That thud meant it was time to send my eldest to kindergarten and brace her for the shock of being, in her words, “IN school, ALL day, FOREVER…where there is TOO much hustle-and-bustle and TOO much BLAH-BLAH-BLAH and NOT ENOUGH MOM.” How do you argue with that?

I usually love everything about this time of year: cashmere, cords, boots, pencils, Trapper Keepers, turtlenecks, blankets, rain, Oscar movies, books, hot lattes, and brown-liquor beverages. But, like my kindergartener, I am moving more reluctantly toward fall this year. Our summer highlight reel is playing in my mind, as it certainly is in hers, and I suddenly can’t remember why cutting those 400 pb&j sandwiches into squares and lugging all that beach gear and cleaning sand out of the lint trap seemed so annoying at the time.

Fall is not only turtleneck time, it’s buckle-down time, and I’m faithfully back at my computer writing a new book, and drinking my coffee, and trying–like my eldest-to keep my chin up. There are lots of exciting things on deck: lectures, radio interviews, a new parenting title out this spring, fresh ideas bubbling all over the place. I will get into the swing of things, and she will too. But right now, I have to say, I’m yearning for less alarm clocks and school shoes and BLAH-BLAH-BLAH and more barefoot girls in the backyard, calling for another lemonade, another popsicle, another swim. Maybe I’ve become a summer girl after all.